Speaker: Christof Weiß and Meinard Müller
Affiliation: 1, Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science (CAIDAS), Universität Würzburg, Germany; 2, International Audio Laboratories Erlangen, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
Title: Studying Tonal Evolution of Western Choral Music: A Corpus-Based Strategy
Abstract: The availability of large digital music archives combined with significant advances in computational analysis methods have enabled novel strategies for musicological corpus studies. This includes approaches based on audio recordings, which are available in large quantities for different musical works and styles. In this paper, we take up such an audio-based approach for studying the tonal complexity of music and its evolution over centuries. In particular, we examine the tonal evolution of Western choral and sacred music exploiting a novel audio corpus (5773 tracks) with a rich set of annotations. The data stems from one of the world’s leading music publisher for choral music, the Carus-Verlag, which is specialized on scholarly-critical sheet music editions of this repertoire and also runs an own record label. Based on this corpus, we revisit a heuristic strategy that exploits composer life dates to approximate work count curves over the years, % compensate for missing annotations on years of composition, validate this approximation strategy, and optimize its parameters using the reference composition years annotated in the Carus dataset. We then apply this strategy to derive evolution curves from the full Carus dataset. We compare the results to a study based on a purely instrumental dataset and test three hypotheses on tonal evolution, namely that (1) global complexity increases faster than local complexity, that (2) major keys are tonally more complex than minor keys, and that (3) instrumental music is more complex than vocal music. % , and that (3) secular music is more complex than sacred music. % comparing (1) major with minor keys, (2) instrumental with vocal music, and (3) sacred with secular music. The results provide interesting insights into the choral music repertoire and suggest that well-curated publisher data constitutes a valuable resource for the computational humanities. % - Analyzing Tonal Evolution of Western Choral Music: A Corpus-Based Strategy % - Validating and Applying Strategies for Musical Corpus Analysis: A Case Study on Western Choral Music % - Tonal Evolution of Western Choral Music: A Corpus Analysis and its Methodological Validation % - A Corpus Analysis of Tonal Complexity Western Choral Music: … % - Analyzing Tonal Complexity Corpus Analysis of Tonal Complexity Western Choral Music: % - Applying and Evaluating Strategies for Musical Corpus Analysis: Exploiting a Publisher’s Repository % Validating, evaluating, applying, … % methodological validation % Strategies Musical Corpus Analysis % Tonal Complexity Evolution % A Case Study on % A Corpus Analysis of % Tonal Evolution % Western Sacred / Choral / Classical music % Publisher’s (and record label’s) repository % Testing different hypotheses: % - Major vs. minor keys % - Instrumental vs. vocal music % - Sacred vs secular music % Contributions: % - test on a new dataset, substantial extension (no. composers, spanning 450 years, …) % - validat strategy, lifetime distribution vs. true composition years % - test different hypotheses on musical evolution
